In offline applications such as movie production, character movements can be smoothly choreographed since the character poses are known in advance for each moment of the movie. For online applications such as video games, character poses are dynamically generated “on the fly” (e.g., based on user input) and are not easily pre-determined. Further, techniques for constructing and editing character movement (e.g., displacement maps, retargeting and blending) can introduce or exacerbate imprecise relationships between characters and environmental conditions.